Mr Fox said in the Sunday post that while Shoes of Prey had some success as a small startup, it struggled when it attempted to scale into the mass market.

"Despite all the right trends towards personalisation and our success within the customisation niche, contrary to our market research, the mass market fashion customer just didn't respond as we expected," he said. "We learnt the hard way that mass market customers don't want to create, they want to be inspired and shown what to wear."

Mr Fox said mass market customers want to see the latest trends and what celebrities and Instagram influencers are wearing and they want to wear exactly that - both the style and the brand.

"They don't want to invest time in creating a product themselves, and attempts to have them do this, even in small ways, leads to the paradox of choice kicking in causing decision paralysis, in turn lowering conversion rates," he said.

Shoes of Prey attempted to pivot to serve customers with small, large, wide and narrow feet and to undertake short, fast run manufacturing for other retailers and brands.

Shoes of Prey shut its website for a pause in August 2018.

However, again this was unsuccessful and the business faced challenges as it was "operationally complex" with "high fixed costs", and producing shoes one at a time "while also operating our factory legally and ethically" meant the cost of producing shoes was high.

"As with our customisation business, while there were strong early signs that the sizing and short run manufacturing markets might work for us, we weren't able to clearly prove that these customers were willing to pay us enough at a large enough scale to cover our fixed costs," Mr Fox said. "While the destination isn't what we wished, the journey has been incredible."

Ms Fox is currently writing a book about Shoes of Prey which is set to be released this year.

Mr Fox said he had moved on from Shoes of Prey to explore "the plant-based meat space".